Roots of Evil(99)

‘And now,’ said the first one, ‘you’re here to spy out our secrets and then go running to the Gestapo with them.’


Fighting to speak calmly, Alice said, ‘You’ve got it all wrong. What can I do – what can I say – to convince you?’ But even if she had not been recognized, her instincts were warning her not to disclose her real identity. She might one day be very glad to have Alice Wilson’s identity to escape into. ‘Truly, I never worked for the Nazis,’ she said.

By now the small flames had burned up a little and she could see the hut more clearly. The narrow beds were arranged in rows along both walls, and at one end was a squat iron stove with a metal cup carefully placed on its surface as if some liquid was being warmed. Several of the dimly seen figures seemed to be huddled around the stove, their thin hands held out to it. Alice, trying to take in as much as she could through the sick waves of exhaustion, had the fleeting impression of some kind of organized grouping, as if turns might be taken to sit around the stove for warmth.

‘I’m here because I cheated the Gestapo,’ she said.

‘How? What did you do to cheat?’

The voice was still hard and uncompromising, as if its owner was prepared to dismiss as lies any kind of answer given, but Alice said as levelly as possible, ‘I supplied false information about escapes from the camp. Several of us did so – we fooled the commandant and made it possible for others to get out.’

‘I say she’s lying,’ said a woman from the stove, who had not spoken yet. ‘Leave her to her own devices. That’s what we do with jackals who snoop for the Gestapo, don’t we?’

There was another murmur of assent, and they turned away, leaving Alice standing helplessly inside the door. Panic swept in again, this time at the prospect of being an outcast in this place. Shunned by the prisoners, and certainly the focus of the guards’ enmity, since they would know what she had done at Buchenwald.

The thought had barely formed when there was the sound of footsteps outside. The hut door was unlocked and the violet dusklight slanted in, showing up the bare floorboards and the sparse furnishings. But even before that happened, the tiny comforting candle-flames had been quenched and the accusing faces had melted into the darkness.

Four men stood in the doorway, all of them in the dark uniform of the Gestapo. The tallest of them stepped across the threshold, his lips thinning into a fastidious line as the smell of unwashed bodies reached him. A thin scar puckered the skin of his face from the cheekbone to the corner of his mouth. Sabre scar, thought Alice, as the searchlights fell across the man’s face. The duelling scar that was once a mark of honour among German officers. It gave his mouth a twisted, snarling look, so that just for a moment it was as if a wolf had donned a human mask, and as if the mask had slipped a little.

His eyes rested on her, and then in a terse clipped voice he said, ‘Baroness?’ It was not quite a question; it was more as if he was identifying her to himself, but Alice lifted her chin challengingly, and said, ‘Yes.’

‘I am Rudolf Mildner, chief of Gestapo at Kattowicz and head of the political department at Auschwitz. You are to come with us.’ He nodded to the men with him, and two of them grabbed Alice’s arms, so that she was forced to let go of her small bundle of belongings.

‘Where are you taking her?’ demanded the woman who had seemed to be the leader of the hut’s occupants, and this time there was an unmistakable note of protest in her voice. Alice could see now that she was younger than the others, and that she had the distinctive high cheekbones of an Eastern European.

‘She will be punished for her behaviour and her deceit,’ said Mildner. ‘She is an arrogant bitch who attempted to make fools of the Third Reich.’

‘It was not very difficult to do so,’ said Alice softly, and this time there was a definite wave of warmth from several of the women.

But Mildner’s eyes snapped with fury and he came closer, his thin lips twisting into the wolf-snarl again. ‘Tonight, baroness,’ he said, ‘you will be taught a lesson. It will be a lesson you will not forget, and from it you will learn that those caught trying to deceive the Führer receive no mercy.’



Alice was never to know exactly where in the camp the Gestapo took her that night. Auschwitz was too alien for her to work out its layout, and too big. In any case, the world had shrunk to a hopeless misery where time had ceased to exist or even to matter, and where all paths looked the same.

The months inside Buchenwald had taught her that to struggle against the SS or the Gestapo was useless, but she did struggle, although it was a hopeless sobbing struggle and she knew she would not escape.

Mildner’s men took her to a low brick building and pushed her into a long room that looked as if it might be some kind of officers’ mess. There were tables and chairs, and the semblance of a bar at one end with drinks and glasses set out. The curtains were drawn against the night, and an iron stove stood in one corner, roaring its iron-smelling heat into the room. Four Gestapo officers were seated at a table; they turned as Alice was pushed through the door, inspecting her with their eyes.

With a fair assumption of anger, she said to Mildner, ‘Why have you brought me here?’

He gave the smile that only lifted half of his mouth. ‘I told you that you were to be taught a lesson, baroness,’ he said. ‘And so you are. For my men it will be a very pleasurable lesson.’ He paused, and two of the men laughed in a horrid jeering way. Alice hated them.